Joel Alleyne, whom we haven’t heard from in a while here at Slaw (busy man!), was the moderator at the Ark Conference I participated in last week. The conference had the unwieldy but search-engine friendly title Best Practices & Management Strategies for Legal Library & Information Service Centers. I heard Joel speak a few years back to the Toronto Association of Law Libraries on Communities of Practice so I was quite surprised at how much the discussion has changed. In a Web 2.0 world, social media has made it even easier for communities to come together.

It appears that the major law firms in Toronto are equally divided on subscribing to Hein Online based on my recent informal survey.

Nine law firm law libraries subscribe to at least the law journal module on Hein with nine law firm law libraries not subscribing. Some noted that their incoming law students are well aware of the product (from law school) and seem to expect the firm to have it. Those that subscribe seem to love it and cannot imagine life without it. Many of those who do not subscribe expressed cost and budgetary restraints as a factor.

As many of you may know, I’ve been working at establishing The Court, a new weblog at Osgoode Hall Law School that focuses on the work of the Supreme Court. In the course of editing contributions I’ve come to realize how handy it would be to be able to link over to a designated paragraph in an SCC judgment, para numbers being the points of internal reference for online judgments since there are no page numbers, of course.

Unfortunately, in the official judgments available online, the paragraph numbers are not also html internal anchors in the way that . . . [more]

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE FOR ACCESSING ACTS AND REGULATIONS

OTTAWA, February 27, 2007 – The Department of Justice has recently launched a new website that incorporates a cutting edge, made-in-Canada search engine for accessing federal acts and regulations.

The press release touts the improved search engine that can be used to quickly and easily find the most current version of a statute or regulation, and to get point-in-time searches of statutes and regulations, as well as track changes and amendments to them. For statutes, point-in-time versions date back to 2003, and March 2006 for regulations.

Up until now this has been primarily a networking tool for the hi-tech group, not to mention a number of consultants. Sure, there were your early adapters from other areas, including librarians and lawyers, but it was largely a few of us inviting each other into our networks.

That is now changing! Almost overnight, this thing has gone into overdrive and . . . [more]

There’s a nice little caselaw blog over at enotes.com called Decision of the Day. It offers you three or four hundred words on a recent decision, which might be a painless way to surf atop the froth of U.S. law in general. The entries are pretty-much summaries — think of them as readable headnotes. And some garner commentaries that are interesting to pursue.

enotes is a sort of upscale and free “Coles Notes” for a bunch of topics, law being one of them. . . . [more]

Back in 1964 Sol Gillis of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia designed the tartan you see to your left for the State of Maine; Jane Holmes, a Mainer (? Maine-liner?, Maineite? …), claims she got the rights to the design in 1993 and has been ordering the cloth from Scotland since that time. But now L.L.Bean is selling an “American Tartan Shirt” with that very design, and Ms Holmes is not best pleased. She’s sued L.L.Bean, which claims that the design is now in the public domain. (See the CBC story.)

The Creative Commons folks have released version 3 of the copyright licensing package. A main feature of the new version is the disentanglement of the U.S.-specific license from the generic license useful in other jurisdictions. This aspect is not of critical importance here in Canada, perhaps, because like 30 or so other countries we have available a CC license set “ported” to our law. But version 6 addresses other matters that could be of interest to Canadians, such as moral rights, royalty collecting societies, exclusion of endorsement, etc. These are explained in some detail on the CC site. Presumably . . . [more]

I recently polled some of the larger Toronto law firm law libraries regarding their holdings and use of Halsbury’s Laws of England (and the recently published Halsbury’s Laws of Canada).

Readers of SLAW might be interested to know:

Halsbury’s Canadian Converter

Only 3 of 16 law libraries continue to subscribe to the (green) “Canadian converter” volumes for the (old) 3rd edition (and two of those law libraries were likely to cancel). Although many thought it was a useful service, almost all responding noted that it was rarely used (and difficult to use since it was necessary to “translate” the . . . [more]